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Assistant Dean for Legal Information Services and Professor Legal Research Caroline Osborne recently spoke at the University of North Texas Annual Open Access Symposium. The event was held on May 18 and 19, 2015 at the UNT Dallas College of Law and titled “Open Access, the Law, and Public Information.”

The 2015 symposium examined aspects of how the law relates to the open access movement, including copyright law, privacy law, access to government information, and access to and use of legal literature online. Dean Osborne presented a program, “The Open Access Advantage for American Law Reviews” with Carol Watson of the University of Georgia and James Donovan of the University of Kentucky.

Assistant Dean of Legal Information Services and Professor of Legal Research, Caroline Osborne has been awarded the Outstanding Article Award from the American Association of Law Libraries’ Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section. Her article “The Open Access Advantage for American Law Reviews” appears in 3A Edison: Law and Technology 1 (2015) (with J. Donovan and C. Watson).

From the abstract:

Open access legal scholarship generates a prolific discussion, but few empirical details have been available to describe the scholarly impact of providing unrestricted access to law review articles. The present project fills this gap with specific findings on what authors and law reviews can ex- pect.

Articles available in open access formats enjoy an advantage in citation by subsequent law review works of 53%. For every two citations an article would otherwise receive, it can expect a third when made freely available on the Internet. This benefit is not uniformly spread through the law school tiers. Higher tier journals experience a lower OA advantage (11.4%) due to the attention such prestigious works routinely receive regardless of the format. When focusing on the availability of new scholarship, as compared to creating retrospective collections, the aggregated advantage rises to 60.2%. While the first tier advantage rises to 16.8%, the mid-tiers skyrocket to 89.7%. The fourth tier OA advantage comes in at 81.2%.

Citations of legal articles by courts is similarly impacted by OA availability. While the 15-year aggregate advantage is a mere 9.5%, new scholarship is 41.4% more likely to be cited by a court decision if it is available in open access format.

Director of the Law Library and Professor of Legal Research, Caroline Osborne is elected as Vice President/President-Elect of the Southeastern Association of Law Libraries.

Professor Osborne formally took office at the SEAALL Annual Meeting in Knoxville, TN on April 5, 2014. The position is a two year term during which Professor Osborne will serve as Vice President in 2014-2015 and President in 2015-2016.